Battle High

[Valence]

I understand where people are coming from suggesting a +damage taken modifier, but I don't think it would turn out as expected. All it would do is bring us back to the ranged meta; a melee job with BH5 would not be able to get close without getting blown up. I can also foresee people using Return to switch jobs then switch back to reset their BH and get the target off their back. Scholars would become broken too, because 1) their spread DoTs would benefit from both types of damage increase (imagine a BH5 SCH spreading off a BH5 target, whew), and 2) they only need to be in range for 1 GCD to do all of their damage, so they are never in danger of dying.

The inherent danger of having two enemy teams turn against you for being a threat should be the negative to balance it out. It is possible for BH5 teams to collapse and ultimately lose to a well-coordinated pinch - ask any premade and I'm sure they have plenty of stories like these. Though most of the time people lose confidence when they see BH5 on the enemy team--and if they had the game sense to coordinate a pinch, they probably wouldn't have let the winning team build so much BH in the first place. I don't know. I can see the issue, but nerfing or outright removing BH isn't my most favourite idea because I feel like a lot of its issues could be mitigated if people in general put more thought into their gameplay (not a dig at anyone here; I really mean that the wider community and their mindset towards PvP needs to change, but that's a topic for another day).

I do agree that Recuperate being tied to BH is ridiculous. That is the one thing I would change - other than that, I'm mostly fine with BH. Though I'm all for removing it if the PvP devs can think of something more interesting to replace it.

In my opinion melees innate DR is completely bullshit and it should be a lot lower. It's piss easy to just go in, go out with barely a scratch and I'm not even talking about the fake melees like NIN or DRG that can just play at range perfectly fine.

But yes, a diminution of DR (or % vuln) would need to be really, really small, which would already be big on its own. If a BH5 melee gets a 10% vuln, that's already plenty enough to me and it still makes them tougher than a base DNC. I do agree that it's a tool that can go wrong very fast. But what's best, a melee meta or a ranged meta? Cause currently it seriously looks like a melee meta to me.

I do not vibe much with the idea of sandwiching the winning team. I've seen it work, but usually it does vs winning teams full of solo BH5 players, not teams full of premades. Every time I've seen it happen, or actually field commanded it, both attacking teams got kitchen sunk and annihilated completely, even with the winning team having some casualties. it just fed them even more than if we hadn't attempted anything. Every, damn, time. You need premade tools and tactics to deal with premade teams.

[Aravell]

I do not vibe much with the idea of sandwiching the winning team. I've seen it work, but usually it does vs winning teams full of solo BH5 players, not teams full of premades. Every time I've seen it happen, or actually field commanded it, both attacking teams got kitchen sunk and annihilated completely, even with the winning team having some casualties. it just fed them even more than if we hadn't attempted anything. Every, damn, time. You need premade tools and tactics to deal with premade teams.

It kind of depends on how organised each team is. I've seen 3 outcomes happen when a team gets sandwiched:

1) The team that's getting sandwiched backs up and the 2 teams that are trying to sandwich end up slamming into and fighting each other instead.
2) The team that's getting sandwiched just backs up and lets the 2 enemy teams flow together and then annihilates them.
3) The sandwich actually works and the team being hit gets wiped.

[Commander_Justitia]

In my opinion melees innate DR is completely bullshit and it should be a lot lower. It's piss easy to just go in, go out with barely a scratch and I'm not even talking about the fake melees like NIN or DRG that can just play at range perfectly fine.

But yes, a diminution of DR (or % vuln) would need to be really, really small

I still see 2.x 3.x frontline as standard what they should aim for. The modifier existed back then too, just way smaller. The difference was that our dmg ouput was a lot smaller too, and our big gamechanging buffs (that were part of our rotation, not limit breaks) had high cooldowns. So you slowly died and had time to counter it, this aspect is gone now, and it is more a "you better die before you can click your heal and get out of the stun".

So I advocate to reduce healing and dmg ouput a bit, but! give PvP jobs skills/buffs to increase and mitigate dmg on a higher cooldown, 40s-2min I am thinking. But that would mean adding 1-3 new skills, something I am afraid is against their design philosophy.

Then you wouldn't have to care about these DR as much, instead of passive DR factor to even it out, it should be an active factor - pressed by the player at the right time, to even it out - similar like Guard, but not so restricting...more like old safeguard. Guard with 5s is not long enough for frontline. Which again boils down that PvP for 5vs5 and 24vs24vs24 should be treated separately.

[Raederle]

Battle High is fine as it is imo. It is true that the bh team can snowball, but there is a 2nd thing in factor that balance bh buff, a thing that basically in every bh forum post I read I never saw mentioned: limit break charge time.

If a team has lot of high bh players, they are probably the winning team, thus their lb charge slower (x0,75); meanwhile the 3rd team lb charge faster (x1,25). And if you can use more lb during a match, you can deal more dmg.

The difference is pretty big: 3rd team can use 66% more lb than the 1st team, giving a way to the losing teams to fight against the bh team.
Let's make an example: dragoon. Drg lb takes 132 secs to charge if you're winning, but only 79 secs if you're the 3rd team. If the match is let's say 16 minutes, a drg that is winning can use its lb only 7 times, while a drg in the 3rd team can use its lb 12 times.

[Valence]

It kind of depends on how organised each team is. I've seen 3 outcomes happen when a team gets sandwiched:

1) The team that's getting sandwiched backs up and the 2 teams that are trying to sandwich end up slamming into and fighting each other instead.
2) The team that's getting sandwiched just backs up and lets the 2 enemy teams flow together and then annihilates them.
3) The sandwich actually works and the team being hit gets wiped.

I'll add a 4) that is actually pretty frequent in my experience, while 3 almost never happens: both flankers attack at the same time, the premades wipe one side out while their solo casual players serve as meatshields on the other side, and then either they withdraw and bail out, or they just kitchen sink the second team once they're ready again.

[Araxes]

It's complicated.

- I like that it rewards good play.
- I don't like how it snowballs for the winning team.
- I like that it pushes competent teams to go for kills in order to build BH in order to secure victories.
- I don't like how it goes completely out of hand with the current kitchen sink / DRK meta.
- I don't like how it doesn't come with drawbacks, like decreased innate DR.
- I don't like how it relies on kills, the system is way too unstable and inaccurate to properly calculate when to land the killing blow, turning it into a gigantic lottery, and it also rewards kill stealing, or specific jobs that have blessed damage OGCDs to weave/spamm in order to leech kills.

Exactly this. In the End i would be fine if they removed it though and instead balanced the entire Game mode towards the Numbers of players it has. We play a PVP Game mode with a big amount of players balanced towards small scale pvp.

[tsuchii]

It's dumb and should be removed or at least modified.
Increase damage but do not increase HP and defense. 1 person should not need an entire party to kill. That is a very flawed design.

[Volfe]

Adding drawbacks or adjustments to it seems like the most reasonable option. This and making some of the melee classes actually killable...

As others said BH is a good thing to strive for, so you're not completely helpless when your alliance is underperforming.

[Taliriah]

People are saying that it "rewards good play" but that's redundant: good play is naturally rewarded because it lets you achieve victory. It doesn't need an extra reward on top of that.

[Valence]

That's fair.